After Baby Hope Confession, Assessing the Value of Taped Interrogations

Q. The police commissioner announced more than a year ago that detectives would videotape their interrogations of suspects in serious cases like murder. That’s what they did in the Baby Hope case, right?

A. Wrong.

Q. But I read that the confession of the suspect, Conrado Juarez, was on tape.

A. Correct. His confession was taped. But confession is not the same as interrogation. They only turned on the cameras after he had been in custody under interrogation for many hours and was ready to say, “I did it.”

Q. So?

A. They’ve been recording confessions for years — true confessions, false confessions, they pretty much all look the same. But after so many people who confessed were proven innocent with DNA tests, we now know that it’s not the confession part that tells you whether to believe someone — it’s that first 12 hours in custody, or whatever it was before the camera went on, that tells you how he or she got to “I did it.”

Q. Wait a minute. Certainly, you can believe a confession from a person who knows details that only the killer could be privy to. That’s a true confession, right?

Of those 40 confessions, 38 of them included supersecret facts, like the victim was wearing red-striped pajamas and carving a chicken when he was stabbed, and the killer used moisturizing lotion on his own cuts.

Granular details that are never released publicly. Yet somehow, the people who were 100 percent innocent actually knew these things.

He tells about a woman who confessed to killing a man. She knew insider things like that the victim was wearing his wedding ring when he died, and that his credit card had been used at a People’s drugstore and a Chinese takeout place. Case closed.

A few weeks go by, and it turns out the woman has a strong alibi. Charges are dropped.

Years later, with the case still officially open, Detective Trainum went back to the file because he still suspected that the woman had gotten away with murder. He discovered that he and the other detectives accidentally videotaped the whole interrogation — not just the confession. That’s when he found out how an innocent person could know unreleased details of the killing.

Q. How?

A. At one point during the interrogation, they were trying to get her to admit to using the dead guy’s credit cards, and said, isn’t that your signature on these slips? And they showed them to her. So she read the name of the drugstore and the restaurant.

At another moment, they showed her the crime scene photos. In one, the left hand of the corpse was prominent. You could see the wedding ring.

And it was a fluke, because interrogations were not usually recorded in Washington.

Now they are required by law in Washington and 17 states. New York City said we didn’t need a law.

Q. So why haven’t they done it?

A. They don’t feel like it.

Q. That’s not what they say, is it?

A. No. But they fought it for years.

Q. What are their stated reasons?

A. Takes time. It’s not a matter of flipping a switch. Many detective squads are in run-down station houses that are short on space. They have to mount three cameras and microphones. About 1,500 detectives have to learn this.

Q. Are you saying that the suspect in the Baby Hope case was coerced into confessing and that’s why they didn’t record the interrogation on video?

A. Not at all. Just that it’s crazy for coercion to be an issue.

With a video, there’s no argument.

The same thing happened when a mentally ill man was interrogated about the disappearance of Etan Patz. The police questioned him near his home in New Jersey, where they have video setups, but didn’t begin recording until he had been in custody for eight hours.

Q. So it’s going to take years to start this?

A. Actually, there are already 28 police interview rooms across the five boroughs set up with recording equipment.

Q. So why didn’t detectives in the Baby Hope case — and all murder cases — use one of those 28 rooms?

A. I don’t think they felt like it.

Correction: October 28, 2013

The About New York column on Friday, about the Baby Hope case and police interrogations, described an interrogation in the Etan Patz case incorrectly. The police began recording a suspect while he was in custody in New Jersey; they did not wait to record him until they brought him to New York for arrest.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2013, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: After Baby Hope Confession, Assessing the Value of Taped Interrogations. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe